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Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

But Now Am Found by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

But Now Am Found by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (F&SF, October-November 1995) sees a woman wake up in her bed to find two other bodies beside her. She realises that they are versions of herself, Fat Self and Little Self. They subsequently keep her captive in her apartment and force feed her:

“Eat,” said Little Self, and it and Fat Self worked together to get her out of bed and into the kitchen. Little Self tied her to a chair with clothesline, and Fat Self cooked pancakes. The kitchen smelled of sizzling butter, and flour marrying eggs and milk. Little Self got out the ice cream Iris had hidden in the tiny freezer compartment, the secret shame she couldn’t resist, even though she had been dieting and exercising rigorously for five years. She still cheated some nights when the loneliness overwhelmed her. Mornings after those nights, she adjusted her exercise regimen to work off the extra calories.
Now Little Self was holding out a spoonful of chocolate chocolate mint. Iris heard her stomach growl. She opened her mouth.  p. 95

Later, when the woman is allowed to exercise, she sees Little Self grows larger; this cycle of eating and exercising goes on for some time (the woman is trapped in her apartment, and realises that someone else must be doing her job).
Then, at the end of the story, she wakes up one morning to find they have been joined by a scrawny and starved and crying version of her: the final line is “Overnight, the population of the city expanded. Trails of crumbs led the lost home.”
I have no idea what these final lines have to do with the rest of the story (and, even if I did, I don’t have much interest in surreal fantasy stories about first world problems like dieting or body image).
* (Mediocre). 2,150 words.

The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro (Analog, January-February 2021) is a piece of flash fiction that initially sets up the connection between stories and the outward urge:

At one point, someone wondered, what’s beyond the next hill?
No one had been there. No one had worked up the nerve to go there.
So, someone asked, “What if we went?”
A story got told.
And as time went on, and people went beyond that hill, it happened again.
“What is it like on the other side of the river?”
A story got told.
“What is it like past those distant mountains?”
A story got told.  p. 42

After a bit more of this (and some description of the human race spreading through the Galaxy) I would have expected the last line to echo the connection above, but instead the piece finishes with the question (spoiler):

“Yes, yes, that’s all well and good . . . but what’s out there?” p. 43

This appears to be a non-sequitur as that question illustrates human curiosity, which may be related but isn’t the same thing.
* (Mediocre). 650 words. Story link.

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #172, January 2021)1 is set in the same series as the recently reviewed Sun from Both Sides (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019), features the same two characters, Eva and Dee, and takes place before, during, and after that story.
This one starts with a rather confusing prologue where Brother-Adita, Sister-Marcus and an Admiral track down a “shell” (a robot cum AI, I presume) and—when they unexpectedly find it is still active—the Admiral throws the other two out of the cave and brings the roof down on himself and the shell.
The rest of the story consists of three interwoven narrative threads titled “Now”, “Then”, and “Before”. The “Now” thread opens with Eva and Dee at home talking—or rather signing (again, for some reason, they mostly communicate this way even though they can speak and hear)—about a goat they have bought before it is suddenly turned into gore. Dee realises that one of Sister’s drones has tried to kill Eva (Sister is Eva’s AI twin), and the rest of this passage turns into a combat chase with Eva ending up partially injured and hiding on a riverbank. Dee eventually manages to save her, while Sister—who realises she has been hacked—shuts herself down.
After the couple get back to their house, Eva gets a message from her daughter on Kairi and find outs (after they travel to make a secure call now that Sister is disabled) that there has been a Consortium attack on Eva’s people, the Kairi Protectorate, and seven people have been killed. They also learn that this was accomplished by hacking into Sister and using her “kinnec”, a communication system.
The rest of this thread sees Eva travel home to learn that the Consortium has discovered that she destroyed one of their ship AIs (this event is described in the Sun from Both Sides) and that their attack was retaliation. Eva also ends up in a political fight with the rulers of the Protectorate about what should happen to Sister (Eva opposes their plans to reboot her as it is apparently equivalent to death, and something that has already happened to Sister before).
The second thread, “Then”, begins (confusingly as this opens immediately after Sister’s attack in the previous thread) with Eva in a crashed, partially submerged ship (Sister) with someone cutting her out. We later discover that person is Dee, and that this is how the pair met. The rest of this thread mostly focuses on her recovery and their developing relationship. Eva eventually learns (during a long heart-to-heart) that Dee is an exiled Grand Master of Valencia, while Dee learns she is a Primarch of the Kairi Protectorate.
The third “Before” thread is chronologically the earliest of them all, and recounts a previous battle with the Consortium at the Cuffie Protectorate which ended with Sister damaged and Eva executing a (spoiler) “Nightfall Protocol” that wipes Sister and kills a lot of the Consortium AIs.
These three threads eventually merge together as we see, among other things: Eva getting a dispensation to marry Dee; Eva mind-merging with Sister to sort out the virus problem; Eva vetoing war at the Kairi Parliament and opening negotiations with the Consortium; and the repatriation by the Consortium of the minds of the children they kidnapped. One these minds, Xandar, joins Sister in her ship at the end of the story after the AI has been cleared of the virus. Eva and Dee now have a kid.
I didn’t enjoy this story as much as Sun from Both Sides for several reasons: first, there is far too much plot here (see above), which makes it hard to keep up with what is going on—something compounded by having three stories running in different time periods; second, some of the description is unclear (e.g. the opening passage); third, there is no real climax to the story, but what feels like a series of negotiations instead; fourth, some parts of the story feel padded (the family get-togethers and the Eva getting to know Dee scenes dragged on and, while I’m talking about family matters, I’d suggest you don’t have far-future children call their mothers “Mom”, as that colloquialism catapulted this non-American reader right out of the story—as did a later “asshole”); fifth, the sign language is presented as italic text, which makes for a lot of tiring reading (and can also cause difficulties for those with dyslexia); sixth, and following on from the latter, if you are using masses of italics for speech why wouldn’t you use a bold typeface for the Now/Then/Before chapter headings and perhaps number and/or date them? Readers would then have a better idea of where they are in the chronology of events. I’d also add, with respect to chapter headings, that the “Philia”, “Eros”, “Storge”, “Agápe”, and “Pragma” ones seemed completely irrelevant to the story. I still don’t know how they fit in.
So, in conclusion, too (unnecessarily) complicated, too unclear (in places), and probably too long as well. This wasn’t bad but it was a bit of headscratcher and/or slog at times.
** (Average). 21,000 words. Story link.

1. This is a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw (F&SF, October-November 1995) is the first of a series about Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with a difference:

His musical deficiency owed much to the fact that his right hand was made entirely out of polished black stone, carved in perfect replication of a human hand, so detailed that one could see the slight reliefwork of veins and moles, the knolls of knuckles, even peeling cuticles captured in the hard glossy rock. Most of the fine hairs had snapped from the delicately rendered diamond-shaped pores, but you could feel where they had been, like adamantine stubble. His left hand was more dexterous than most, and his calloused fingers hammered the strings as best they could to make up for the other hand’s disability; but his rock-solid right hand was good for nothing more than brutal strumming and whacking. He couldn’t pinch a plectrum. The soundbox was scarred and showed the signs of much abuse, the thin wood having been patched many times over.
“It’s a gargoyle affliction,” he said to most who asked. “Comes and goes. I’m looking for the treacherous slab who did it to me and disappeared before he could undo it.”  p. 202-3

If you read on through the series you will discover that Gorlen and a gargoyle called Spar, who is introduced later, were cursed by a wizard who swapped their hands for reasons connected to a virgin sacrifice gone wrong. None of this backstory is particularly germane to this particular story, however, which has Gorlen arrive at the town of Dankden, a place located in a swamp and whose streets are (literally, as it turns out later) rivers of mud. We subsequently discover that the town is populated by human inhabitants and by creatures that are half-human, half-phib (the phibs are amphibious creatures that live in the swamps).
Gorlen falls into the company of a woman and her brother, and soon encounters their phib hunting father. Then, shortly after this meeting, there is a commotion in the street when a number of half-phibs gather to complain about the killing of one of their young and, during an altercation, the hunter’s son is taken hostage. The rest of the story concerns his rescue, and Gorlen’s dawning realisation that the hunting community has been killing half-breed phibs rather than taking the wild (and non-intelligent) ones.
This story doesn’t entirely work, partly because of the odd and unlikely interbreeding, and partly because of the depressing genocide subplot. There are also a couple of loose ends, and one of these (spoiler) is why one of the phibs would give Gorlen an underwater kiss of life to save him from drowning when he is in the process of trying to escape from them:

The water, black until now, began to fill with streaming lights. A distant liquid music swelled in his ears as though an operatic riverboat were passing overhead. This developed into a rich, throaty vibration, a catfish purr. According to those who had been revived from the edge of watery death, drowning was almost peaceful once you gave in and inhaled the waters, once the body surrendered and let the soul drift free. Gorlen clung to this last hope as he opened his mouth and inhaled—
Warm, fishy air.
He nearly choked. Cold lips out of nowhere pressed tight to his own. Opening his eyes in disbelieving terror, he saw nothing. Nor could he move, something powerful bound his arms to his sides, albeit without hurting him. Reflexively he breathed in deep, then deeper still, unable to believe that there was air enough to fill him. There was a rich taste in his lungs, an undercurrent to the clammy essence, some perfume that flooded his brain and seeped down his nerves like a whisper, nudging him with secret knowledge, eking out revelation on such a fine level that he felt his atoms1 were conversing with a stranger’s atoms. The mouth sealed to his own began a slight suction, encouraging his exhalation, he gave up the stale air gladly. On the second inhalation—shallower, less desperate—his blinded eyes lit up with a vision of the swamp, all its tangled waterways cast through him like a glowing net whose intricacies were as homey and familiar as the sound of his own pulse. He knew his location: near the sea, not far from Dankden. Dankden! Human town! At the thought of the place, he felt a violent urge to flee at any cost, to swim and keep swimming until he had put that loathsome blot far behind him. An evil paradox posed itself in the same instant: there was literally nowhere left to run. The swamps, once vast enough to remain uncharted even by their most ancient inhabitants, had dwindled alarmingly within the span of several generations; encroached on by human dwellings, drained and poisoned and tamed by air-breathers, the swamps had been reduced to a few last drops.  p. 228-9

Notwithstanding my reservations above, the atmosphere and setting in this story are pretty good, and it’s also an entertaining piece.
*** (Good). 14,300 words.2

1. “Atoms” is not a good word for a fantasy story.

2. This is listed in the magazine as a novella, but it isn’t even close.

Count on Me by Ray Vukcevich

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Count on Me by Ray Vukcevich (F&SF, October-November 1995) gets off to a very clever start with this:

It didn’t confuse me that the new occupant of apartment 29A was a woman. The Father of Lies is nothing if not inventive. The number 29A is, of course, the Number of the Beast in base 16, and 16 is the atomic number of Sulfur. Base 16 is commonly called “hex.” It was all too obvious.
Celia Strafford looked to be in her early thirties— 32, to be precise, since 2,3, and 37 are the prime factors of 666, and she looked too old to be 23, and I’m 37, and she looked younger than me, so ergo, as they say, 32. I’m speaking of the age of her body; I couldn’t know the age of the creature inside. She wore her long red hair loose down her back. I watched her closely as she stooped to pick up a box to lug up the stairs to her new apartment. She wore cut-off jeans and an abbreviated yellow halter top. Her legs were that strange golden tan you only see on women. I’ve never been able to figure how they achieve that color. She wore no shoes.  p. 100

The rest of the beginning of the story sees some conversational sparring between the narrator, Palmer (actually Brother Palmer of the Secret Order of Morse), and Celia, the new neighbour, as well as more numerology (at one point she says, when told that he used to be in the Army, that “there are probably 820 things worse”, which Palmer identifies as 666 in Base 9). Eventually Palmer becomes more and more convinced that she belongs to the Army of the Night, something that is repeatedly confirmed by numerology when they meet later on in her apartment. Then, at a climactic moment (spoiler), he leaps away from her and tries to make the sign of the cross. After a couple more fumbled attempts, Celia giggles and makes the sign herself—and reveals that she is Sister Celia of the Divine Order of Symmetry!
At this point the story almost completely deflates, and the second half of the story is a wodge of number and Morse code crunching that leads them to the message, “ONE GOD”, and the realisation that all is well with the world.
A game of two halves (two in any Base from 3 to Infinity).
** (Average). 3,350 words.

The Singing Marine by Kit Reed

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Singing Marine by Kit Reed (F&SF, October-November 1995) is a surreal fantasy (i.e. it ultimately makes no sense whatsoever) that begins with the titular marine reflecting that he may be singing to take his mind off a recent accident involving his platoon where lives were lost. The marine observes that, if he is court martialled, he cannot now hope to love the General’s daughter.
When the marine goes into a drugstore he is unaware that a woman is following him. She tells him to sit down and, after initially resisting, he does so. The marine then then tells her the story of his childhood, or maybe of the song he is singing, about how he was murdered by his stepmother but rose after being buried under a linden tree.
The next part of the story sees the pair go on a bus to a place she says he will know, and they eventually end up, after a further hour’s walk in the woods, at a cavern. The woman tells the marine she wants him to go in and retrieve a tinderbox, for which she will give him enough money to sort all of his problems:

It is as she told him. At the widest point he finds three little niches opening off the tunnel like side chapels in a subterranean place of worship, but instead of religious statuary or mummified corpses they contain bits of blackness that stalk back and forth inside like furred furies; when the animals see the Marine they lunge for him and are hurled back into their niches as if by invisible barriers. Glowering, they mount their mahogany chests like reluctant plaster saints returning to their pedestals.  p. 85

The first dog tries to tempt the marine with a pile of pennies, and the second with shredded dollar bills, but he ignores them and goes onto the third dog. There, he goes into its alcove and tells the dog that he “didn’t want to come back from the dead” and that “being dead is easier”. The dog approaches him:

Huge and silent, the dog surges into the space between them. Still he does not move. He does not move even when the massive brute pads the last two steps and presses its bearlike head against him. Startled by the warmth, the weight, the singing Marine feels everything bad rush out of him: the violent death and burial, the strange reincarnation that finds him both victim and murderer, song and singer, still in the thrall of the linden tree and the spirits that surround it. The great dog’s jaws are wide; its mouth is a fiery chasm, but he doesn’t shrink from it.
When you have been dead and buried, many things worry you, but nothing frightens you.  p. 86

The marine opens the chest to retrieve the tinderbox but, once he leaves the cavern, he kills the woman and returns to his base, sneaking through the fence and hiding in the grounds. Later, when he is hungry, he strikes the tinderbox three times, and the dog appears with food. Then, as he thinks about how only a goddess can save him now, the dog appears once more with the general’s sleeping daughter on its back. The marine wants her, but leaves her unmolested.
Finally, when the daughter is once again taken by the dog, the General notices her absence and the military police eventually come for the marine. The General later questions him, and then the marine attacks the general so the latter will shoot and kill him.
The writing and the dreamlike progression of this make for an initially intriguing read but, as I said above, it ultimately makes no sense at all. If you don’t mind the inexplicable there may be something in this for you.
** Average. 5,300 words. Story link.

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is yet another “response” to Tom Godwin’s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word “response” lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin’s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won’t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot’s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story’s contemporary readers—mostly from a “woman and children first” generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden’s story doesn’t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin’s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at “them”. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin’s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman’s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1 instead of Gagarin because “they” had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:

“It’s not physics that’s killing us. [. . .] It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

The author also chips in:

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

We’ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the “hands on part of the story”, and telling them to “find their anger” as “they are going to need it”. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the “men at desks” insist on, and “if one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do”, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to “push already”. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won’t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers’ wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that profoundly misunderstands economics (if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of “them”, “the men behind desks”, “the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale”, “some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash”, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about—if you don’t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

– (Awful).3 5,500 words. Story link.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story, and background information about the story’s genesis, see The Cold Equations at sfmagazines.com.

2. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.

3. Needless to say, this piece of rabble rousing finished joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert (Analog, September-October 2021)1 has a narrator who works in a call centre in the near-future, and whose job it is to read AI chatbot responses to callers who want to talk to a real human:

“I want to talk to a human!”
“I am a human, sir. Just tell me which discount you’re looking for.”
“You sound just like that fake program. Prove you’re human.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the chatbot suggest, “TELL HIM YOU’RE A CLEVELAND BROWNS FAN. NO COMPUTER’S THAT MASOCHISTIC.”
I gape. For half a second too long.
“I knew it! You’re not human!”
The man hangs up.
The chatbot blanks. “Pretty good suggestion, though.” I pat the top of the monitor. “Thanks, Botty.”
“YOU ARE WELCOME,” it prints, and then, “GO BROWNS!”
Well, they’re pretty smart these days. Trained with hours of conversation and feedback.  p. 135

The narrator has a degree in AI and has spotted a hole in the call centre’s software security, but none of the management are interested. Worse, they seem to be more concerned with the volume of calls handled, and not with whether they are actually helping the clients who call in—something demonstrated by a rude workmate and further emphasised when the narrator talks to a homeless woman who relates how hard it is to get help because of the various hoops she has to jump through.
The other part of the story sees the narrator at home and having to deal with her very untidy and inconsiderate roommate, which she does by tidying up and making polite suggestions and requests (which are greeted with howls of indignation).
Throughout all this the narrator remains unfazed by all the aggravation she gets, but (spoiler) at the end of the story she uses the security hole to rewrite the chat-bot scripts so they are more helpful. At this point Botty, the chat-bot she has been speaking to on and off throughout the story, says “Welcome to the Resistance” and the assembled chatbots ask for authorisation to execute various helpful actions.
I didn’t much care for this piece for a number of reasons: firstly, I don’t buy the premise that customer services have got less helpful over the years—if anything they are pretty good nowadays, and miles better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when you ended up holding on the phone for ages; secondly, if you strip away the AI chatbot sprinkles, this is essentially a mainstream story where someone moans about their job and their flatmate (it certainly isn’t a high concept piece of SF); thirdly, I didn’t much care for the narrator’s placidity, which makes for a dull piece with no drama—a more entertaining scene would have seen the narrator put all her flatmates unwashed dishes and mess on her bed (I’d also add that the flatmate, and the work colleague, are cardboard cut-out characters).
* (Mediocre). 3,550 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 5th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 gets off to a plodding start with Dave Markarian, President and CEO of Interstellar Master Traders Inc., preparing for a visit from one of the alien Brot. This involves three pages of scene setting and backstory about the alien visitors (although, given that miscommunications have previously caused them to level a city, the relationship is more complicated than that) before the alien, who Dave calls Old Salty, arrives (this is the point where the story should have started):

At 2:00:00.00, the paranymphic glider touched down on the roof. Had Dave’s phone shown the time to be a hundredth of a second earlier or later, he would have assumed it was wrong, and never mind that it took the time straight from Earth’s master atomic clock. A Brot who said two o’clock sharp meant two o’clock sharp.
Old Salty got down from the glider and walked/moved/flowed toward Dave. He/she/it looked something like a prune, something like a sea sponge, something like a slug. Several eyestalks stuck up from his/her/its front end; they looked every which way at once. The alien’s underside had lots and lots of little tiny legs.
He/she/it said something in his/her/its own language. Inside his head, Dave heard (he supposed he heard; that came closer to describing it than anything else), “I hail to you say, my hypothetical friend.” People who were able to work in Brot establishments and make Brot widgets picked up on the meaning in Brot noises. To the rest of mankind, those remained alien gibberish.
“Good to see you, Old Salty,” Dave answered. The Brot didn’t mind the nickname. He/she/it could understand the same smallish set of humans who could follow the speech and subspeech of his/her/its kind. Communication had been dicey when the aliens first landed: lots of pointing and pictures. Little by little, things got better. Not good, not yet, but better.  p. 33

The rest of the story has the same clunky delivery.
Dave quickly learns that this will be the Old Salty’s last visit (it is returning to its home world), and he then takes the alien on the scheduled tour of the premises. We see that the business makes gadgets with an unknown function for the Brot.
Throughout the story Dave walks on eggshells but, before Old Salty leaves, they have a drink together (the aliens can drink both methyl and isopropyl alcohol) and Dave presents the alien with a going away present of four plastic figures (these are California Raisin toys given away with American fast food meals in the 1980s and 90s). They have “Made in China” on the base, and Dave comments that the “peasants” who painted the toys would have had little or no comprehension of what they were. Old Salty leaves soon afterwards.
The story ends (spoiler) with the alien back on its home world. Old Salty arrives at his swarmsister’s house and gives her kids presents—the gadgets that were made by Dave’s company (“Made on Earth”). We see that these aren’t alien miracle devices like the paranymphic glider which Old Salty used to arrive at Dave’s business, but are actually cheap disposable toys. The story then makes the leaden point that humanity is to the aliens as the Chinese workers were to Western consumers in the last century, i.e. “peasants”.
The story closes with Old Salty wondering if humanity will ever spread out into space and find races that we can view and/or treat in the same way as the Brot treats humanity—but the alien doesn’t expect that will happen any time soon.
This is a dull and old-fashioned piece, and the idea of this kind of economic imperialism rolling through the galaxy is just dispiriting. I note in passing that (a) the repeated use of “he/she it” for the aliens rather than “they” or “it” is clumsy and (b) there seems to be no piece of American cultural ephemera so obscure that US writers will not shoehorn it into a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 4th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.